Academia

Category archives for Academia

I’m on Google+. After a couple days of playing with it, I haven’t quite identified what it is for, or at least how I’m going to use it differently from twitter or facebook, but so far I am generally impressed – it’s easy, intuitive, and fast. It also allows you a level of selective privacy…

Being a great science teacher is not so different from being a great science writer. You have to convince your audience to pay attention to you, rather than to the myriad other potential sources of entertainment and engagement out there. You have to maintain their attention: at any time, a reader can click over to…

…For a feature article in this week’s Nature on how scientists go about developing and managing online personas. You can check out the article – for free – here. It’s a good article, and you’ll probably recognize some other familiar faces (e-faces? blog-faces?) in it as well. While the interview, which I did back in…

Welcome to part 3 of the Science Blogging 101 series. You can find part 1 here, in which I discussed my own experiences with blogging, and part 2 here, which I discussed some of the big questions regarding audience, purpose, and so forth. How do you balance blogging with the rest of your work? Do…

“At home, a young man should be dutiful towards his parents; going outside, he should be respectful towards his elders.” -Confucius (Chinese philosopher, 551-479 BCE) “Your real boss is the one who walks under your hat.” -Napoleon Hill (American author, 1883-1970) Those two quotations reflect a cultural difference in how people construct their own conceptions…

Part 2 of the n00b Science Blogging 101 series concerns the big questions of blogging: audience, purpose, and so on. You can find part 1 here, in which I discussed my own experiences with blogging to provide adequate context for this and the remaining posts in the series. What audience do you have in mind…

Earlier today, I had the pleasure of speaking via Skype with Dan Simons‘s graduate-level science writing class. We talked about the ins and outs of academic blogging, and the nature and ecosystem of science communication online, and the students asked some terrific questions. I had asked Dan to ask his students to compile some questions…

We initially planned on doing these group blogcasts roughly once per month, but then, well, Pepsigate happened and blogs were moved, people were distracted, and so on. But the dust is finally starting to settle, so it was time for another. I should point out how awesome it is that this group blogcast spans three…

My Child’s Play co-blogger Melody and I are the subjects of today’s Bloggingheads.tv Science Saturday program. Watch us chat with eachother for about an hour on how we became scientists and science bloggers, our thoughts on the state of psychology as a field, peer review and the journal system, how the study of language learning…

As I’m sure many of you did, I recorded Phil Plait’s (twitter, blog) Bad Universe pilot last week, and it was so good that I watched it twice. And then two more times as I tried to figure out why it was so compelling. Why am so interested in picking apart these particular 44 minutes…